Adriaan van Dis
Adriaan van Dis (b. 1946) was raised in the Dutch town of Bergen along with his half-sisters, the children of parents with an Indonesian background, traumatised by war. He debuted in 1983 with the novella 'Nathan Sid'.
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After making a name for himself as a travel writer with books such as Het beloofde land (The Promised Land) and In Afrika (In Africa), he sealed his reputation with the award-winning bestseller Indische duinen (My Father’s War, 1994). His later novels such as Familieziek (Family Fray, 2004), De wandelaar (The Walker, 2007) and Tikkop (Betrayal, 2010) have all sold well and received glowing reviews. His novel Ik kom terug (I Will Return) (2014) received the 2015 Libris Literature Prize. That same year he received the Constantijn Huygens Prize for his entire body of work. In 2017, he published De Zuid-Afrikaboeken (The South Africa Books) and the novel In het buitengebied (In the Hinterland). Van Dis’ books have been translated into many different languages.
More Adriaan van Dis
The Walker
Mr Mulder seems to all appearances to be a upstanding gentleman, gliding through life, impeccably dressed, aloof to the hustle and bustle of the world around him. Because of a sizeable inheritance he can afford to idle away his time, and so he leaves Holland for Paris, where he leads an anonymous, solitary existence. One night he witnesses a dramatic fire in a building occupied by illegal immigrants and transients. People throw themselves out of windows in blind panic, as the crowd below looks on helplessly.
My Father’s War
The autobiographical nature of Adriaan van Dis’s work can be partly deduced from the fact that the surname of the main character in his debut novella, 'Nathan Sid', is an anagram of his own. Like his character Nathan Sid, Adriaan van Dis had a father who came from the former Dutch East Indies and lived in a house full of repatriated people in the dunes near the Dutch town of Bergen aan Zee.
I Will Return
Adriaan van Dis has explored his family history before but never so unflinchingly as in this memoir. In the final phase of his mother’s life she is at last prepared to talk about living through three wars and the death of her first husband, beheaded in a Japanese internment camp. Adriaan van Dis pieces together her past and his own in a brave and uncompromising book.